Grow Grow Grow
by starinhercorner
Summary: "Emotions come raw. Martians can move them from mind to mind as easily as they can move the objects in their surroundings. They can share feelings in their purest, simplest state—but in a way, that, too, is a limit."


No Martian can say their own name the way it sounds in their head. Their lipless mouths, heavy tongues, hefty throats—speech as she's learned it can actually be hardly comes as naturally as growling or snarling, and while she doesn't like to think that they were all built to sound so angry, it fits. The idea that a stranger's passing grunt could be synonymous with distaste is nothing new to her, and the more she learns about Earth the more she understands her own world, somehow. Universal secrets are universal.

Her teacher says language came about because of records, written history; the passing-on of information from mind to mind through generations was unreliable in the long run, and their kind learned better. He communicates this to the gathering of young ones in words, and from time to time, she spaces out. Sounds click in her head as similar to the ones she hears on television, and she can't help but imagine school bells clanging, happy human laughter playing over music that makes her want to dance. Her mind slinks away from the collective less than gracefully, and she's made to feel shame for being a distraction. Her peers think it's funny, but they aren't laughing along. Little pinpricks of derision stick into her psyche from all sides.

They don't need to say a word for her to know their sentiments towards her. Feelings pass between minds so smoothly—when allowed. She goes quiet, as good as dead in the link.

She could rattle off the names of kings and queens, high priests and priestesses if prompted. She could state dates and document titles. What the people felt is lost to time. She doesn't know why that makes her so sad. She can't imagine the people of the past being any different than the ones around her now—except for worse, if the planet's war-torn surface could speak anything of its wreckers. Even the new world hovering and rustling at the edges of her imagination can't convince her there's anything here to be missed, but something grieves her, all the same.

The teacher carries on just like before. _There is so much we would not know today without our language._ The statement is delivered from a deep place but filtered through walls and walls and walls. There is no personal memory attached to the thought, no context of when or how or why he gained the knowledge that he has.

_But there's so much out of reach_, she thinks as vaguely as possible; hides under the recognition of a standard itch between neck sinews, the kind all younglings get at this phase of their brain growth. She will not argue, not with an adult and _definitely_ not with a Green.

Emotions come raw. Martians can move them from mind to mind as easily as they can move the objects in their surroundings. They can share feelings in their purest, simplest state—but in a way, that, too is a limit.

She thinks they made up words to lie.

She's the only one in the house that watches J'onn J'onzz's conference to the people of Earth more than once—ten times, actually, edging ever closer to eleven. The initial transmission had brought their whole family together in one setting, swelled the room with pride at their mother's brother's success so far on the foreign planet. She had hung near the back, kept her head open to the outside sound and her mind as pushed shut as she could manage against the distracted chattering of her sisters.

Seeing one of their own, not even of their family but of their species, lit up on a screen the same way as Megan does not lose its effect on her so easily. She practices smoothing her forehead and narrowing her face as her uncle speaks, and as flashes go off; she rolls herself a lower lip and bites it almost instantly, draws it back and whimpers quietly at the pain.

The part comes, as it always does, where he assures the throng of spectators that he is of a friendly and peaceful species. She scoffs lightly this time. Her mother hears it and sends her a brief reprimand, and she accepts it. She's figuring out that trouble is attention and she's liking it (she's wanting it), a decisive shift from her constantly-pressing concern for the trouble that attention brings. No one noticed her sneak out of her room and make it halfway across the city until the third night anyway, go wandering when the safe walls of her room became suffocating.

She's not the only one amongst her siblings who tries to mimic their uncle's strange new face and form; she could count the ones that do on the few fingers she groans to pull out of the sides of her claws, the ones that end up at her wrists instead. There are numerous frantic calls for a parent to come help when bones get stuck, for mother or father to form specific links and shift bio-forms back into soothingly familiar shapes. It's just that no one is changing the color of their skin but her. She is one of the oldest, she should know better, she has been _told_ better from the earliest age that she ever questioned why she could not just _become_ Green—but she doesn't hide the pleasure glowing in her mind as she paces through the common room clapping six stubby green fingers against each other all at once. She is not able, quite yet, to move them one by one.

Her parents single her out, sit her down alone and talk. She feels an unsettling lack of panic at her core, like she may be becoming numb, or self-assured. Neither is a state of being that she can comprehend, but she does not ask for clarity on what is happening in her mind. Something tells her that they shouldn't see.

_Understand that this is not accepted. Understand that this cannot be seen._ Their words are stark and strained. She knows that how they feel about this and about her is more complicated than what they communicate to her, and she will not believe anything else. She thinks they really have the solution. She thinks she knows it, too.

_But I am the niece of..._ It seems so true and right before she has to force it into words. The steam in her heart dissipates instantly. _You are the..._ Nothing, on any end of the link. She gives her mother and her father each a mental tap to make them respond, to break their pensive silence. _We... We are the... connected to... the... the..._

_Understand that this is not accepted_, repeats her mother. _Understand that this cannot be seen_, repeats her father. With dismay and hesitance backing their every word they spell out the compromise they are willing to make. _Do not leave the house in a Green guise. Do not leave your room in a Green guise. Do not let your sibling know, or see, in any way when you put on this skin. This way, no one can be hurt by your... playing._

Their _please_ does not make it into syllabic form, but she feels it by its simplest pieces. _Disappointment. Apprehension. __**Need**__ for her to be different, better_. Some of her youngest siblings are afraid of her at times, in clumsy bursts of unease that are easily forgotten, but this comes softly into her mind, like a foundation being laid.

The consensus is reached among the nobles in a sweeping instant. After the broadcast, beginning in mimicking the human form join the curriculum of standard education for her age group. With all her practice at home, she takes to it during the public sessions much more quickly than her Green peers, but no one seems to notice. It isn't quite _okay_, not deep down, but it doesn't dishearten her either.

She spends a whole episode of "Hello, Megan!" looking down at her new thumb and rolling it until the cells in the already-volatile joint are burning. The cramping does hurt. Just like the other children, she feels it, too. But it's a tangible kind of pain that makes its own absence feel like a wash of horror over her muscles, an unstoppable rattling in her bones. She grows her first five-digited hand and touches everything with it, drags it along the walls of her room and across the planes of her face. She puts a finger between her teeth and tries for a lip again, and nothing bleeds this time.

She looks up. Everyone leans in closer to smile at Megan, and Megan grins wide. The frame freezes, and the same list of names as always shoots up the screen, people who get to live the life that she falls into sometimes in her dreams. The smooth, bright boards of an Earth house pile more and more into the sand floor of her mind as of late, and she curls into the barely-there corners now and then to truly rest. She's of the age for psyches to become more individualized now, and to clear away the last imprints of the womb.

It's just that the _wood_ is white here, not her skin. She is green as the grass on Megan Wheeler's lawn, with the same kind of blurred glow. The flesh padding her hipbones fills them out in smooth curves, but is hard as rock; it robs her of walking balance and leaves her floating off the ground or crawling in the dirt. Her neck is thinner in her mind than she can physically make it, and her brain is so, _so_ heavy.

What she's done to herself, all the little twists and tweaks she's made to her mental form—it should feel wrong. And it does. Because it—she—isn't finished yet.

She pours herself over the anatomy materials, even sleeps in positions mimicking the people in the diagrams; doesn't leave her room much, but when she does, walks out on human feet. The length and arch of her legs are still unrefined, and she wobbles incessantly, refusing to levitate. Doing so would pull her back closer to where she started, and it's a fine line she walks, her clusters of small white toes crunching against red rock floor.

She's stuck. The other children shift themselves new heads and hands and stomachs for fun, but for her it turns to ritual, and it's a vital, delicate thing that's _hers _that she doesn't know how to show. It reveals too much of _her_. Strangers' eyes on the street become harder and harder to look at, much too easy to see. The first structure she builds herself in her psyche is a wall, and the second is a door that locks. It's then that she finally learns how to speak from the surface of her mind, not the core. More walls follow.

The green is inherent now. She cannot drain it out of her mental skin to match her physical—not with thoughts of the Martian hero on Earth, the thought of _family_ on Earth; there's something irrevocably wrong with her so long as she is on Mars. She knows that stipulation. She knows it. She feels it more and more with each passing day.

The small form with smooth arms and legs and breasts, the form with a heart the size of its fist and a brain the size of two, that stays inside. She learns to strip things down and close things off with more than words. Her body, too, becomes a lie.


End file.
